Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he plans to re-open the Sustainable Farming Incentive for new applications for farmers in South Suffolk constituency.

This Government has committed £5 billion over 2 years to sustainable farming and nature recovery and we’ve worked hard to get as many farmers into environmental land management schemes as possible.

We have closed the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) for new applications because the current SFI budget has been successfully allocated, with large-scale uptake of the scheme and 37,000 live SFI agreements delivering towards our environmental targets.

We will be reforming the SFI offer to direct funding towards SFI actions which are most appropriate for the least productive land and have the strongest case for enduring public investment. This will allow us to align SFI with our work on the Land Use Framework and the 25-year farming roadmap to protect the most productive land and boost food security, whilst delivering for nature.

We expect to publish more information about the reformed SFI offer in summer 2025. This will include an indication of when we expect to re-open SFI for applications.

We invite farmers from South Suffolk to follow our blog to keep updated on the latest news.